Details

Date Published

Date Built

CPU Clock Rate

3.2 GHz

CPU Temperature While Idle

30.0° C

CPU Temperature Under Load

65.0° C

GPU Core Clock Rate

1.12 GHz

GPU Effective Memory Clock Rate

8 GHz

GPU Temperature While Idle

40.0° C

Description

The last time I upgraded any of the parts in my machine was back in May 2015 when I went for a 8-core CPU and from 8GB to 16GB RAM. I recent recieved a major tax rebate and decided to refresh my build.

First on my list was a new GPU - my aging 7770 which replaced my failed 7870 wasn't looking very happy at Just Cause 3 and Tomb Raider. The obvious choice then was an RX 480 - I typically go for XFX cards but as they were not in stock for the supplier I chose Sapphire instead. Very happy with this - yet to fully test it out.

Next up was a new motherboard. I wanted to keep my current CPU as it was perfectly good and didn't want to replace it just yet, so I was after a Red and Black AM3+ socket board, which the MSI 970 Gaming met well. Plenty of fan connectors, well laid out and with a plethora of features, this is an excellent board which I do like. The SATA ports are very very close to the GPU with a few mm clearance but this does not cause an issue. There's some features I'm not fussed about (Killer NIC for one...) but I will very happily tweak this.

SSD. My OCZ was performing as well as I needed it to, however I was running out of space. A 480GB SSD for just under £100 is pretty good considering the amount I paid for my 240GB a few years back. The 480GB SSD will be for OS, main played games, and programs, while the 240GB SSD will be used as a secondary game location and also to run virtual machines. Anything else smaller or less played will go on the 2TB disk.

Finally, Case. I was running a no-brand (iCute Super 9) case, while large (9 5.2" drive bays) and a 12" side fan was horribly dusty as it had no filters. I wanted a case to match the red/black colourscheme with a side window, and the NZXT S340 was a good match. I was concerned about not having a CD/DVD drive but I very rarely use disks at all now anyway.

Everything else was moved across from my old build. The cable management is slightly better than my old case, and I would like to get some solid black or red SATA cables as the only spare ones I had had white tips. Also the power cable for the GPU is not elegantly cabled and the power cables have a multitude of colours - this isn't that bad for me and if I replace the PSU I will try and get leavening. The USB3 header is horridly twisted but there's very little options for me here. The two fans that were included were installed on the front as a pull, with a spare corsair fan I had installed on the rear as an exhaust. Any feedback regarding the fan setup, and about the build is greatly appreciated.

Motherboard

A decent feature set and a bad-*** colour scheme makes an awesome motherboard. Some features are a bit surplus to requirements (Killer NIC, really?) but plenty of fan headers, ports, and expandability options are all a plus. No onboard video, but if you're trying to run this with no dedicated GPU, well, You're Doing It Wrong.

Comments
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Here's a tidbit of info that I've come to realize and I feel like absolutely needs to be shared, people are worried that this graphics cards is going to fry their motherboards because of all the reports that sprung up after the NDA was lifted on the 29th. Well I have news for you, the card only draws 16-50W at the PCIe slot while at idle and under light loads i.e. web surfing, which should be mentioned is well within PCI-SIG specs. So the notion that this particular card is going to fry your motherboard upon installation and first boot up is ridiculous!

Secondly, this quote direct from Tom's Hardware (the culprit of this whole powergate fiasco):
"AMD's Radeon RX 480 draws 90W through the motherboard’s PCIe slot during our stress test. This is a full 20 percent above the limit. To be clear, your motherboard isn't going to catch fire."

I have a really big problem with this because the game they tested was Metro Last Light at 4K resolution and it's very vague because they didn't specify at what settings (to really stress the card to its max I'm sure it was Ultra). Now, people are saying the target audience for the RX 480 is very cheap and will throw this card in a $50 motherboard and burn their house down (lmao)! Now comes the kicker! This cheap class of PC gamers (referring to us), know that this particular card is NOT a 4k playable GPU! So why on earth would we buy a $200 GPU and a $50 motherboard to try and game in 4K??? SERIOUSLY???

I, for one, would have loved to see what the 480 pulled from the pcie slot on any given game at 1080p in ultra settings, I guarantee it's not 90W! The vast majority of the people who are buying this card do not even own the hardware capable of displaying 4k resolution (4k monitor)! I feel like they set out to kill this card well before it got to the hands of the consumers because they are worried about how blown away we all would be by the fps per dollar value in this "cheap segment"! My last remarks are, if you are like me, and have lots of experience with system building, you won't even hesitate to get a 480, but if you are new to all this, you shouldn't worry about killing off any hardware that you don't even have the capability to destroy for lack of high end equipment (again, 4k monitor).

Judging by what I see in the pictures, your monitor isn't even 4k capable, therefor you can rest easy knowing that, unless you try and stress out your card under 4k settings, you have no worries! Excellent build and congrats on the feature!

totally agree to your point ....
i only play @ 720p mostly occasionally @ 1080p in my country 720p is considered a great quality so tell me will this card useful to me this card costs around 43000 rupees for 4GB and 50000 rupees for 8GB

I was really thinking of buying rx480. After all the power issue problems and motherboard i am hesitating of buying it because i am not a rich guy to change gpu every 1-2 years.I want to keep it for at least 4years.As you said I won't be playing at 4k hell no.I just want to make sure there will be no problems with the gpu.I am still worried and i will wait more to check more reviews etc.Btw my motherboard is msi h110m gaming.

Peal the plastic off please and post another picture! It looks so nice but I can't see anything behind it! I wanna see that super clean inside you got going there! Looks awesome, and I'm loving the team red build! The RX 480 seems like a really awesome card, and I wish I didn't already have a 390. Such a better value. Anyways, your cable management looks great, and the color scheme is awesome :) Nice job!

Be careful about your motherboard dude as the rx480 is out of PCIE compliance. it is reported to draw more than 75w from your motherboard and can kill your motherboard and it pcie slots as well as well as short it out becuase its pulling more power than what MSI and the PCIE standard should be....

And dude keep your drivers updated as it might most likely fix this problem.......... For me i would check DAILY for this driver as a driver should be on the way to fix this.. As a pcpmasterrace member i care for you and tyour hardware....Just lookin out for your bro!!!

As noted the issue is being addressed driver update soon. With that said, the issue only happens with motherboards that are not PCI-E 3.0. In other words, older style motherboards or cheap motherboards that don't have built-in overload protection.

The other debate is why AMD left out the eight pin. There is overload on some of the Nvidia cards, but those cards do have eight pin power connection.

Watch this video from Science Studio, he explains that he tries to do a budget build using a Foxconn motherboard. https://youtu.be/rhjC_8ai7QA

oh yeah i saw that video with science studio, i like his videos... Anyway, thye said that they also release a compatibly mode that runs the graphics card in compatibility mode so that it wont go over the pci experess limit... I think that amd left out the 8 pin simply because were going for the 750ti type of power usage but at a gtx 970 performance level and a gtx 960/r9 380 price point...... And they delivered, just not on the power side of things...I think they build the rx 480 on the power saving perspective not the overclockers or performance enthusiast perspective.... Also amd has slipped a wide range of optiimizations and performance enhancements so that if compatibiliy mode is turned on then it wont really have much of a performance difference.... An somehow they fixed the issue and rx 480 sees performance improvement as well..

This isn't an AIB card, it's just the RX 480 with "swag" stickers. Give it another week or so and we're going to be seeing after marker cards that WILL have greater thermals, better aesthetics and hopefully better clocks. And as far as the "Melting" AMD cards have run hot for 10+ years, this is their coolest card ever! Please don't fall into the hype of people, do your research. It's a great card for people who game @ 1080p/1440p @ 50-65 frames.

It doesn't matter to me who made the card, but I would never buy anything that was out of spec.

One correction I need to make however is that the 480 is way farther out of spec than the 960s. If you take the baseline of the power consumption data (which is basically drawing a line along the bottom of the peak), the 960s are avery close to 75W limit. Granted, there are spikes over 75W which is pretty common for any graphics card (especially overclocked). The Strix version of this card was particularly bad, having a baseline around 75W and very large spikes. The baseline for the 480 however, is much higher than 75. It is probably closer to 90W. This would probably be even worse with an overclock (like any card), but who knows how bad.

Take this as you want, I am just showing what other people's testing has found. As far as I know, nobody has tested these in crossfire yet, so I am interested to see if anything interesting happens there.

Will this card cause your components to blow up? Probably not, but I am personally not going to take the risk. I wouldn't buy a 960 Strix either for what it's worth.

Edit: There are some crossfire tests out there now, and so far nothing has blown up :)

Alright, so I am not an electrical engineer and am pretty ignorant on the science of this stuff, but from what I have gathered from Pcper's video and the comments, I agree with you. The increased power draw of the RX480 is a problem for sure, but it isn't as bad as the 960s/other cards with spikes. Again, this is from what I have read, but the increased average draw is not as dangerous as high spikes, the worst that is likely to happen is the system just turning off as it can't supply enough power (won't damage it I think.) The tiny spikes of the 480 aren't anything to worry about either, it is just the nature of a DC-DC conversion, and happens with every card to some degree. What is far worse for your system is the super high sustained spikes of the 960, which were long enough to show up on graphs (not just a few miliseconds.) This could actually destroy components.

TL:DR From what I have read, the 480 power draw is not a danger to your components like the 960s. For the 480, the increased draw could result in a system shutdown (from failsafe I believe.) The 960 spikes could actually destroy a system without warning.

I'm guilty of this too, but people need to stop making hard opinions about this, and making up facts instead of discussing the topic without

a.) having a card and doing the necessary tests

b.) enough electrical knowledge to form a hard opinion

and just being generally ignorant to the subject (which I am), and hopping on the bandwagon of power issues will cause huge repercussions. (They could or could not.)

I don't know why, but my favorite part of this entire build is the way you did the USB 3.0 cables.. The rest of the build looks killer. But the way the USB cables go up and curl and go into the slots is just really cool..

The motherboard is new enough and of high enough quality (probably) that nothing will happen and the PCIE slots most likely can deliver much more than 75 Watts without issue. the PCIE 75 watt spec is from years ago anyway, when motherboards were of much lower quality. However, this is a "most likely" scenario. If the motherboard is low enough quality, and the power gets too much, it will just shut down the whole PC. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhjC_8ai7QA <== that's what happened to this guy. Either way, no fried Mobo and worst case scenario is the whole pc shuts down when the gpu is under full load. It is a pretty bad worst case scenario though. Hopefully AMD gets it to take extra power from the plug or something.

In the US they were sold out after like 4 hours of release and then we get those pricks on eBay who go to actual stores and buy like 6,7 and I seen one guy show a recipt of him buying 15 and selling them for like $300 each....

i am the only one hoping that sapphire makes a rx 490 with the best coolers on the world, which are the toxic, and the vapor x, my question to sapphire why nitro, everybody loved those cooler, too bad they used it for only one generation. well you have an awesome, go red

50% of comments = watch your power draw out of PCIe slot your motherboard could explode
25% of comments = congrats on getting an rx 480
10% of comments = specs, temps and model of rx 480
14% of comments = amd/nvidia fanboys saying 1 is superior to the others
me WHY ON EARTH DID YOU GET A REFERENCE COOLER!!!

First off I want to say you did an amazing job explaining stuff and reviewing the components. Secondly your PC looks really nice and I hope the 480 works well for you. Just some feedback for aesthetics, I think if you got a new CPU cooler either black or black and red it would make that area look a lot nicer. I also think a nice set of led lights would look aesthetically pleasing. Other than that great build +1

I don't know why people always ruin their Black/Red builds with a Hyper 212 EVO. I'd recommend going with a black Enermax or something along those lines for something that's low-profile and fits perfectly with the color scheme. The 212 EVO has it's place in plenty of builds but when you're going for a black/red build with a window it sticks out like a shiny ugly copper and aluminum thumb.

Sorry, I am just a little frustrated with these people hating on this new AMD card. I think its amazing, but people are making a big fuss over it simply because it draws a few more watts than the box says in games that it wasn't designed to play. Won't happen again.

Yes, it was pulling more that 75 W. The problem isn't the fact that they put a 6-pin (if they did), it was the fact that they didn't CONFIGURE the transfer of energy from PCIe properly. Even IF they did put an 8 pin, nothing would change, except for the possibility of a little better energy efficiency.